Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 beta 3/9/83; site frog.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!bellcore!decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!cybvax0!frog!john From: john@frog.UUCP (John Woods, Software) Newsgroups: net.columbia Subject: Re: Challenger SRBs Message-ID: <343@frog.UUCP> Date: Mon, 3-Feb-86 11:59:46 EST Article-I.D.: frog.343 Posted: Mon Feb 3 11:59:46 1986 Date-Received: Fri, 7-Feb-86 09:43:34 EST References: <4270@mhuxd.UUCP> <958@ihuxx.UUCP> <977@burl.UUCP> Organization: Charles River Data Systems, Framingham MA Lines: 48 > In article <958@ihuxx.UUCP> rck@ihuxx.UUCP (Kukuk) writes: > >It's my belief that NASA Launch Operations will regret that they > >intentionally destroyed the SRBs. Had SRB pieces (or entire SRBs) rained down upon a crowded shopping mall, the Shuttle disaster would have been forgotten by the Congressmen who finally had a concrete excuse to shut down NASA and turn that money over to decent businessmen in their home states... :-( > ...I'm *very* pissed off at NASA at the moment. They kept us > waiting for over an hour on the afternoon of the explosion only to tell > us that they wouldn't tell us anything. I'm willing to believe that NASA _knew_ nothing to tell. Perhaps the news media would have been deliriously happy had NASA elected to release a stream of "Well, it might have been X.... No, it might have been Y.... ", but the problems with this include (1) the vacillation would make NASA look stupid, because each guess (released only out of curtesy) would be treated as an Official Explanation, only to have that Official Explanation Officially Contradicted later, and (2) somewhere the engineers will examine the possibility that some human (or organization) seriously screwed up, and any further guesses released which didn't include that human error (like metal fatigue, etc.) would look like a cover-up, EVEN if the facts later gathered made the human error explanation unlikely (indeed, the better the evidence against, "the more thorough the cover-up", right?). I would dearly love to know, right now, what happened. So would a lot of people. Some of them work at NASA. > Also, from a (possibly) less reliable source: The thing that came down on > a parachute that took forever (almost 20 mins.) to fall was supposedly > the "black box"; just like the flight recorders used on airliners. I don't > know if it was successfully recovered. The Shuttle does not contain a flight recorder. The telemetry continually transmitted is considered sufficient (after all, it is hard to destroy radio waves after you let them go); this piece of misinformation makes me question the other paranoid statements (not included) of the author. -- John Woods, Charles River Data Systems, Framingham MA, (617) 626-1101 ...!decvax!frog!john, ...!mit-eddie!jfw, jfw%mit-ccc@MIT-XX.ARPA This space dedicated to Challenger and her crew, Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Ronald E. McNair, Gregory B. Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. "...and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God."